“For more than a decade, the Turkish director … has been reliably bringing a movie to the Cannes Film Festival every time he had a new one [Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia] … at intervals of about every three years. He won at least one prize each time out.” This year, with Winter Sleep, he’s reached the summit.

For almost 90 years, fans of the philosopher have been agitating for his 1656 expulsion from the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam to be overturned. When that community’s leaders considered undoing that decree in 2012, they asked Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler for advice. He told them “there were no good historical or legal reasons for lifting the ban, and rather good reasons against lifting it.” Here, he explains why.

“The Next Big Book’s dashboard, which Macmillan plans to give to its employees and authors over the next few months, allows the publishing company to see what factors — from Facebook posts to book reviews to appearances on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ — are most influential on sales.”

“The decision to drop the works by the US authors was because of the Department for Education’s desire for the exam to be more ‘more focused on tradition’ and there were fewer opportunities to include them in the new syllabus.”

“When he’s not busy, he’ll get his band together for the very loose, improvised three-hour show at an L.A. club called Rockwell. ‘So we have a kind of hootenanny, or be-in, or some kind of a jam session is what they call it,’ Goldblum says, ‘and people seem to enjoy it.'”